Rap pioneer Jam Master Jay was murdered - 2002

On October 30, 2002, influential rap pioneer, Jason William Mizell was murdered. He is better known by his stage name Jam Master Jay, who was a founding member of the hip hop group Run-DMC. During the 1980s, Run-D.M.C. was one of the biggest hip-hop groups in the world and is credited with helping rap music break into mainstream music with hits such as “It’s Tricky,” “King of Rock” and a remake of Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way.”

On the night of the murder Mizell and some friends were hanging out at his Jamaica, Queens, New York studio packing some equipment for a show in Philadelphia, Mizell got a bite to eat and took a seat on a couch at the rear of the studio. His friend, Uriel (Tony) Rincon, sat next to him and the pair began playing a video game. A short time later, Mizell's assistant, Lydia High, entered the cramped studio to go over his itinerary for the next day. High's brother, Randy Allen, Mizell’s longtime business partner soon came in with two friends, but they shut themselves in the control room at the front of the studio. Everyone had been in the room for less than an hour when a man dressed in black, possibly wearing a hat, stepped in and gave Mizell a hug about 7:30 p.m., but after the short embrace, the man pulled out a .40-caliber handgun. A witness heard Mizell yell out “Oh s---,” before a shot rang out. A bullet hit Mizell in the head, killing him before he hit the floor. The killer and his accomplice, who was standing outside the door, both sprinted out of the two-story building and disappeared. The murder remains unsolved.

 

Michael Thomas Barry is a columnist for CrimeMagazine.com and is the author of Murder and Mayhem 52 Crimes that Shocked Early California 1849-1949. The book can be purchased from Amazon through the following link:

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President William McKinley's assassin was executed - 1901

On October 29, 1901, President William McKinley’s assassin, Leon Czolgosz, is executed in the electric chair at Auburn Prison in New York. Czolgosz had shot McKinley on September 6, 1901; the president succumbed to his wounds eight days later. McKinley was shaking hands in a reception line at the Pan-American Exhibition in Buffalo, New York, when a 28-year-old anarchist named Leon Czolgosz approached him with a gun concealed in a handkerchief in his right hand. McKinley, perhaps assuming the handkerchief was an attempt by Czolgosz to hide a physical defect, kindly reached for the man's left hand to shake. Czolgosz moved in close to the president and fired two shots into McKinley's chest. The president reportedly rose slightly on his toes before collapsing forward, saying "be careful how you tell my wife." Czolgosz was attempting to fire a third bullet into the stricken president when aides wrestled him to the ground.

McKinley suffered one superficial wound to the sternum and another bullet dangerously entered his abdomen. He was rushed into surgery and seemed to be on the mend by September 12th, but later that day, the president's condition worsened. On September 14th, McKinley died from gangrene that had remained undetected in the internal wound. According to witnesses, McKinley's last words were those of the hymn "Nearer My God to Thee." Vice President Theodore Roosevelt was sworn in as president immediately following McKinley's death. Czolgosz, a Polish immigrant, grew up in Detroit and had worked as a child laborer in a steel mill. As a young adult, he gravitated toward socialist and anarchist ideology. He claimed to have killed McKinley because the president was the head of what Czolgosz thought was a corrupt government. The unrepentant killer's last words were "I killed the president because he was the enemy of the good people, the working people."

 

Michael Thomas Barry is a columnist for CrimeMagazine.com and is the author of Murder & Mayhem 52 Crimes that Shocked Early California, 1849-1949. The book can be purchased from Amazon through the following link:

Amazon - http://www.amazon.com/Murder-Mayhem-Shocked-California-1849-1949/dp/0764339680/ref=la_B0035CPN70_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1383058336&sr=1-4

Old West gunslinger Tom Horn was hanged - 1903

On October 22, 1903, infamous hired killer, Tom Horn was hanged for having allegedly murdered Willie Nickell, the 14-year-old son of a southern Wyoming sheep rancher. Some historians have since questioned whether Horn really killed the boy, pointing out that the jury convicted him solely on the basis of a drunken confession that Horn supposedly made to a detective. The jury also seems to have failed to give adequate weight to the testimony of a number of credible witnesses who claimed Horn could not possibly have committed the crime. Yet even Horn's defenders in the Nickell case do not dispute that he was a brutal hired killer who was unquestionably responsible for many other deaths.

Born in 1860 in Memphis, Missouri, Horn reportedly showed an aptitude for hunting and marksmanship at an early age. After moving westward in the mid-1870s, Horn was at various times a cowboy, miner, army scout, deputy sheriff, and packer for the Rough Riders in Cuba, but his most notorious job was as a hired gun. Horn first worked for the famous Pinkerton Detective Agency which hired him to track down and apprehend, western outlaws who were preying on Pinkerton clients, but after four years he became bored; and in 1894 he signed on as a hired killer with the privately run Wyoming Cattlemen's Association. For several years the large Wyoming ranches had been fighting a vigilante war in Johnson County against a diverse group of small farmers, sheep ranchers, and rustlers who were resisting their domination. By 1894, negative publicity had made a public war too costly. Instead, the ranchers shifted to more stealthy means, hiring Horn to use his gun-handling skills to murder any man the ranchers marked as a troublemaker. Some historians suggest that Horn may have murdered Willie Nickell by accident, having mistaken the boy for his father. Others, though, argue that it is more likely that Horn was deliberately convicted for a crime he did not commit by Wyoming citizens seeing an opportunity to take revenge.

 

Michael Thomas Barry is a columnist for CrimeMagazine.com and is the author of Murder & Mayhem 52 Crimes that Shocked Early California 1849-1949. The book can be purchased from Amazon through the following link:

Amazon - http://www.amazon.com/Murder-Mayhem-Shocked-California-1849-1949/dp/0764339680/ref=la_B0035CPN70_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1361552464&sr=1-3

John Lennon & Yoko Ono were arrested on drug charges - 1968

On October 18, 1968, John Lennon and Yoko Ono are arrested for drug possession at their home near Montagu Square in London, England. The arrests came at a tempestuous time for the couple. Only days earlier, an announcement was made that Ono was pregnant, creating a scandal because both Lennon and Ono were still married to other people. Her pregnancy ended in a miscarriage a few days after the arrest.

Detective Sergeant Norman Pilcher, the instigator behind the raid on Lennon and Ono, was an anti-drug zealot who would later arrest George Harrison and his wife on similar charges. While Lennon was frantically trying to get rid of the evidence, the police read a warrant through a bedroom window and then broke down the front door. Drug-sniffing dogs found 200 grams of hashish, a cigarette rolling machine with traces of marijuana, and half a gram of morphine. However, the couple denied that the drugs belonged to them. When the matter finally approached trial, Lennon pleaded guilty because he was worried that Ono would be deported. He was received a small fine and warned that another offense would bring a year in jail.

 

Michael Thomas Barry is a columnist for CrimeMagazine.com and is the author of Murder and Mayhem 52 Crimes that Shocked Early California 1849-1949. The book can be purchased from Amazon through the following link:

Amazon - http://www.amazon.com/Murder-Mayhem-Shocked-California-1849-1949/dp/0764339680/ref=la_B0035CPN70_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1361552464&sr=1-3

Texas Rangers were established - 1835

On October 17, 1835, Texans approve a resolution to create the Texas Rangers, a corps of armed and mounted lawmen designed to guard the frontier between the Brazos and Trinity Rivers. In the midst of their revolt against Mexico, Texan leaders felt they needed a semi-official force of armed men who would defend the isolated frontier settlers of the Lone Star Republic against both Santa Ana's soldiers and hostile Indians; the Texas Rangers filled this role. After gaining independence from Mexico the following year, Texans decided to keep the Rangers, both to defend against Indian and Mexican raiders and to serve as the principal law enforcement authority along the sparsely populated Texan frontier. Although created and sanctioned by the Texas government, the Rangers were an irregular body made up of civilians who furnished their own horses and weapons. Given the vast expanse of territory they patrolled and the difficulty of communicating with the central government, the government gave the men of the Rangers considerable independence to act as they saw fit. Sometimes the Rangers served as a military force, taking on the role of fighting the Indians that in the U.S. was largely the responsibility of the Army. At other times the Rangers mainly served as the principal law enforcement power in many frontier regions of Texas, earning lasting fame for their ability to track down and eliminate outlaws, cattle thieves, train robbers, and murderers, including such notorious bandits as John Wesley Hardin and King Fisher. Even as late as the first two decades of the 20th century, the state of Texas continued to rely on the Rangers to enforce order in the wilder regions of the state, like the oil boomtowns along the Rio Grande. Increasingly, though, some Texans began to criticize the Rangers, arguing that they used excessive violence and often failed to observe the finer points of the law when apprehending suspects. As a result, in the 1930s, the state won control over the Rangers, transforming it into a modern and professional law enforcement organization.

 

Michael Thomas Barry is a columnist for CrimeMagazine.com and is the author of Murder & Mayhem 52 Crimes that Shocked Early California 1849-1949. The book can be purchased from Amazon through the following link:

Amazon - http://www.amazon.com/Murder-Mayhem-Shocked-California-1849-1949/dp/0764339680/ref=la_B0035CPN70_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1361552464&sr=1-3

Mata Hari was executed - 1917

On October 15, 1917, exotic dancer Mata Hari was executed by a French firing squad for the crime of espionage. She was born Margueretha Gertruida Zelle in a small town in northern Holland and formerly married to a captain in the Dutch army; Mata Hari had performed in Paris as a dancer since 1903. She adopted an elaborate stage persona, claiming she was born in a sacred Indian temple and taught ancient Indian dances by a priestess who gave her the name Mata Hari, which meant "eye of the dawn." Her exotic dances soon earned her fans all over Europe, where she packed dance halls, largely because of her willingness to dance almost entirely naked in public.

A courtesan as well as a dancer, Mata Hari amassed an impressive catalog of lovers, including high-ranking military officers and political figures from both France and Germany. With the outbreak of World War I, these relationships immediately made her suspicious to French intelligence, which reportedly put her under surveillance. The circumstances of her alleged spying activities during the war were and remain unclear: It was said that, while in the Netherlands in 1916, she was offered cash by a German consul to report back information obtained on her next visit to France. When British intelligence discovered details of this arrangement, they passed them on to their counterparts in France; Mata Hari was arrested in Paris in February 1917.

Under interrogation by French military intelligence, Mata Hari herself admitted that she had passed outdated information to a German intelligence officer, yet she claimed that she had also been paid to act as a French spy in Belgium (then occupied by the Germans) though she had not informed the French of her prior dealings with the German consul. She was apparently acting as a double agent, though the Germans had apparently written her off as being ineffective. She was tried in a military court and sentenced to death. The trial was riddled with bias and circumstantial evidence, and many believed that the French authorities, as well as the press, trumped her up as "the greatest woman spy of the century" to distract the public from the huge losses the French army was suffering on the Western Front. After her last-minute plea to the French president for clemency was denied, French officers carried out the death sentence on October 15, 1917. Unbound and refusing a blindfold, Mata Hari was shot by a firing squad at the Caserne de Vincennes, an old fort outside Paris. Viewed by many as the victim of a hysterical French press contemptuous of her career as a dancer and courtesan and seeking a scapegoat, Mata Hari remains one of the most glamorous figures to come out of the shadowy world of espionage, and the archetype of the female spy.

 

Michael Thomas Barry is a columnist for CrimeMagazine.com and is the author of Murder and Mayhem 52 Crimes that Shocked Early California, 1849-1949. The book can be purchased from Amazon through the following link:

Amazon - http://www.amazon.com/Murder-Mayhem-Shocked-California-1849-1949/dp/0764339680/ref=la_B0035CPN70_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1361552464&sr=1-3

Amityville murder trial began - 1975

On October 14, 1975, the murder trial of Ronald DeFeo Jr. began. Defoe was accused of killings his parents and four siblings in their Amityville, New York home. The family’s house was later said to be haunted and served as the inspiration for the Amityville Horror book and movies. On the evening of November 13, 1974, Ronald “Butch” DeFeo Jr. entered an Amityville bar and told people his parents had been shot inside their home. Several bar patrons accompanied DeFeo back to his family’s home, at 112 Ocean Avenue, where a man named Joe Yeswit called Suffolk Country police to report the crime. When officers arrived, they found the bodies of Ronald DeFeo Sr., his wife Louise, and their four children. The victims had been shot in their beds. Ronald DeFeo Jr., initially claimed the murders were a mob hit; however, by the next day he had confessed that he committed the crimes.

Police investigators were at first puzzled by the fact that all six victims appeared to have died in their sleep, without struggle, and neighbors didn’t hear any gunshots, despite the fact that the rifle DeFeo used didn’t have a silencer. When DeFeo’s trial began, his attorney argued for an insanity defense; however, the jury did not believe this and he was found guilty of six counts of second-degree murder and later sentenced to six consecutive sentences of 25 years to life in prison. DeFeo, who gave conflicting accounts of these events, later claimed his sister Dawn and two other accomplices were involved in the murders. In December 1975, the DeFeo house was sold to George Lutz, who moved in with his wife and three children. The new owners resided in the house for 28 days, before they fled, claiming it was haunted. Skeptics accused Lutz of concocting the story to make money, but he maintained he was telling the truth. In 1977, Jay Anson published a novel titled The Amityville Horror. The book became a best-seller and inspired a 1979 movie of the same name, as well as a 2005 remake.

 

Michael Thomas Barry is a columnist for CrimeMagazine.com and is the author of Murder and Mayhem 52 Crimes that Shocked Early California, 1849-1949. The book can be purchased from Amazon through the following link:

Amazon - http://www.amazon.com/Murder-Mayhem-Shocked-California-1849-1949/dp/0764339680/ref=la_B0035CPN70_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1381764316&sr=1-3